A New Pasta Dish and Silent Sunlight

My parents are vacationing right now in sunny, beautiful Hawaii! That's what you get to do when you are retired, but I am stuck here at home taking care of the dog and the house. This does not usually inspire me to cook great meals, because as everybody knows, it is just not as fun to cook only for yourself. But there was one day when I went to the local farmer's market and got inspired enough to make a great meal. The basis of the meal was the pasta I bought from the market:
I had never cooked orzo before, but the seller said it was their most popular kind of pasta. There were so many kinds of great looking pastas there that I decided to go with the crowd. The pasta is very colorful, as it is made with saffron, fire-roasted red peppers, and porcini mushrooms. I must say this was a case where following the crowd really worked, because this may have been the best pasta I've ever had! I am definitely going to go back to the farmer's market and getting some more.

For this pasta dish, I decided to use up a bunch of leftover ingredients I already owned. I used:
1 Bacon Slice
1 Chicken Breast
Several Handfuls of Grape Tomatoes cut in half
Artichoke Hearts
Pesto, also from the Farmer's Market

First, I cooked the bacon, while chopping the chicken breast into bite-sized pieces. After the bacon was done, I sauteed the chicken in olive oil and the bacon grease. I added the tomatoes when the chicken was almost done.

Once the chicken was fully cooked, I dumped all of the ingredients into a bowl and let the flavors meld together.
Isn't it a pretty dish? The dish tasted better the next day, cold. Since I could not share it with my parents, I shared it with my friends and they loved it.

In the song, Stevens says, "All my dreams have blown away," and that is true in my case too, at least when it comes to my earlier dreams of being a music therapist. Fortunately, I am able to say that I am not yet done dreaming and I am working on fulfiling newer, more realistic, dreams.